A Friend Worth Fighting For
by CelticGrace
Summary: The story of how best friends and troublemakers extrodinaire Katie Hackett and Jeff "Joker" Moreau met on their first day of kindergarten. Related to my fic The Ties that Bind Us. One-shot. Complete.


**Beta: pixelatrix**

 **Bioware owns the Mass Effect universe and all characters within. If you don't recognize a character, it's probably mine.**

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Messy dark red pigtails? Check. Sullen expression on a freckled face? Check.

Steven Hackett sighed in resignation. Yes, this was definitely his little girl, sitting outside the headmistress' office. He'd known Katie would likely have trouble adjusting to being around other children, and she'd definitely picked up some bad habits from all the time she'd spent with his brother-in-law Jason and nephew Ryan. But Steven had never expected to get a call about her being in trouble on her very first day of kindergarten.

She didn't acknowledge his presence as he walked into the outer office and sat next to her. She seemed to be silently communicating with a dark-haired boy with braces on both legs who sat between his parents on the other side of the room. A second boy, sandy-haired and several years older, sported a busted lip and bloody nose and sat alone.

Steven glanced down at Katie and was surprised to see that she also had a couple of cuts and a bruise darkening on her cheek, as well as scrapes on her knuckles. She'd always been prone to minor scrapes and bruises and already had a couple of scars on her face from roughhousing a little too much with Ryan when they were toddlers. But Steven couldn't imagine she'd actually have gotten into trouble for playing too hard. Unless...

"Patrick Tyler Strickland, what the hell have you done now?" The older boy visibly flinched as a man with the stiff bearing and barking voice of a seasoned drill instructor marched into the room. "This is the third time in two years you've been in here."

"Wasn' my fault," the boy muttered. And then he pointed at Katie. "It was her."

"Was not," she insisted, breaking eye contact with the other boy to glare at Patrick. "He started it."

"Liar!"

She lunged at him, snarling as Steven calmly put an arm out to stop her and pulled her back to sit beside him. He'd gotten used to her sudden outbursts of anger in the two and a half years since she'd witnessed her mother's murder, but usually they were directed at him. Everyone else was simply subjected to the silent treatment, sometimes for weeks at a time.

"See, Dad?" Patrick said. "She's -"

"Did you hit her?" his father growled. "Is that why you're in here?"

The boy shrugged, clearly acting more confident than he sounded. "She hit me first."

"You took his crutch!" Katie practically screeched, gesturing toward the dark-haired boy, who continued to sit in silence between his equally-silent parents.

The headmistress, Mrs. McGinnis, came out of her office then, looking grim. "So you've all made it then," she said, looking around at all of the adults. "Now, I trust I don't need to remind you all how seriously we take accusations of fighting, and bullying."

Patrick shifted uncomfortably in his seat, a move that was not lost on either his father nor the headmistress.

"Is there something you'd like to say, Patrick?" Mrs. McGinnis asked calmly.

He glanced over at his father briefly before he shook his head.

"Very well. Kathrine, how about you?"

"He started it," she said again.

"Who did? Patrick or Jeffrey?"

"I didn't do anything!" Patrick said.

Mrs. McGinnis sighed and turned to the silent boy. "Jeffrey?"

"It was him," he said quietly, not daring to look in Patrick's direction. "Pushed me, took one of my crutches."

"She hit me in the face with it!" Patrick said insistently, looking to be on the verge of tears as he glared over at Katie.

Steven glanced down at his daughter, who seemed to be holding back a tirade of her own. "You hit him in the face with a crutch?"

"Didn' mean to," she muttered, suddenly fascinated by a scuff on one of her shoes.

"But you did punch him on purpose?" Mrs. McGinnis asked.

Steven groaned inwardly as Katie nodded.

"I see. Well, before I decide on who should be punished and for how long, I think it would be prudent if we all watched the security footage from the playground."

Steven caught the triumphant look Katie and Jeffrey shared when Patrick paled considerably as the group got up and followed Mrs. McGinnis into her office. As soon as everyone was arranged as comfortably as was possible in the small office, the headmistress brought up footage from the after-lunch exercise time.

They all watched as Patrick deliberately followed Jeffrey as the younger boy tried to navigate the throngs of children running around. They watched as Patrick suddenly knocked one of Jeffrey's crutches away and pushed him to the ground. A moment later, Katie appeared from off-screen and snatched the crutch from Patrick, hitting him in the face with it in a move that didn't look entirely accidental. She then helped Jeffrey up and handed him the crutch.

As the pair began slowly walking away, Patrick reappeared and grabbed Katie by the arm. Even given the distance of the camera from its target, it was obvious how hard he'd squeezed as she winced, just before she spun around and tackled him.

"I've seen enough," Mrs. McGinnis said as she turned the vid screen off. She glanced at Jeffrey, sitting in one of the chairs in front of her desk. "Were you hurt at all?"

He shook his head. "I'm okay."

"Very well. You may go."

He stopped and whispered something in Katie's ear as he passed her on the way out of the office. She and Patrick both looked like they desperately wanted to be leaving with him as the door closed behind Jeffrey and his parents.

"As for you two –"

"Don't bother with this one," Patrick's father said gruffly, pulling his son up from his seat. "I'm going to follow through with his mother's suggestion of sending him to military school back on Earth."

In that moment, the boy could have passed for a ghost as all the blood drained from his face and he tried to argue against his father.

"Very well," Mrs. McGinnis said again. "We'll speak later about arrangements to transfer his records elsewhere."

The man nodded. "And until then, I'm keeping him home." He forced Patrick to stop in front of Katie's chair. "Tell her you're sorry."

The boy mumbled something that vaguely passed as an apology while staring resolutely at the corner.

His father rolled his eyes. "Good as you'll get from him, I suppose." He pushed Patrick ahead of him and nodded at Steven. "Sorry for the trouble."

Steven saw a look of pure loathing pass between Katie and Patrick as the boy and his father walked from the room.

"Two down, one to go," the headmistress murmured as the door once again slid shut.

Ten minutes later, Steven was leading an absolutely fuming Katie from the office. She'd thought it completely unfair she was getting detention when Patrick was getting days off school.

"Do you want to go to military school on Earth?" Steven had asked, knowing full well the answer would be a begrudging "no."

She perked up immediately when she saw Jeffrey and his father still sitting in the outer office.

"So? Did you get in trouble?" the boy asked with a grimace. "You didn't get kicked out did you?"

She shook her head. "Nope. Got de... tention," she said, frowning uncertainly before she added, "ya know, after school sitting with the teacher."

Steven knew she was quite familiar with the concept even if she wasn't all that familiar with the word, considering how often Ryan had already been through it in his two years of school, and how often the pair of them spoke on vid-coms. He thought his nephew could have done with a dose of military school as well but Jason would never go for it.

"You're also grounded for a week," Steven said quickly, frowning at the conspiratorial look that passed between his daughter and her new friend, no doubt making silent plans to spring her from 'school jail,' as Ryan most often called it. "Noble as your intentions were, you were still in a fight."

Her shoulders slumped. "Fine."

Jeffrey's father held out a hand and introduced himself. "I don't mean to intrude, but my wife and I were wondering if you two would like to have dinner with us sometime, as a thank you. Not that we condone fighting, of course, but we are grateful for the fact that someone came to Jeff's defense. Considering his condition, that could have ended worse than it did."

Katie looked up at Steven hopefully. "Please?"

He nodded after a moment. "All right, dinner would be nice." He glanced down at Katie. "You're still grounded though."

She didn't appear to have heard him, or didn't care, as she squealed and ran over to Jeffrey.

Steven sighed as he watched the two of them whispering excitedly as they all walked out of the office. "Those two are going to be trouble, I just know it."


End file.
